Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?
Impression
I’m incredibly disappointed.
And I’m disappointed because I love the Prisma Illya manga. In a single episode, and through Herz in general, Silver Link have maimed the future of this adaptation. I’m not saying it has to be faithful to the point it reproduces every last panel in the manga, because that would be unrealistic – changes have to be made. But after so many seasons, it should be an accurate representation of what it really should be. That is, a fantasy magical girl series which evolves into an established spin-off and gets progressively darker. If you create entire swathes of filler episodes that shouldn’t exist, if you fuck up the second half of the final episode so badly that it’s beyond recognition, then that’s not a proper adaptation at all.
Now, it would be a different situation entirely if they aimed to end the adaptation here – if they decided not to go onto 3rei!, as the manga is still on-going. If that were the case, then I would fully accept this episode – it’s nice to have a happy ending, where Illya saves Miyu and they all go back to their peaceful lives. But they ARE going to animate 3rei!. And this is not how the 2wei! manga is supposed to end at all – there is no happy ending, and things are supposed to escalate even further. It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to just say that Miyu does not grab her hand in the manga. If you want, you can read the last chapter of 2wei! here, starting from the page with Quintet Fire – if you do, you’ll be able to grasp just how massive a difference there is between the proper ending and the one made by Silver Link. Also, isn’t the manga artwork great?
In fact, it’s odd even from an anime-only standpoint. In this episode, Gilgamesh pulls out Ea and uses Enuma Elish at full power – an anti-world Noble Phantasm. In Fate/Zero, when he used it against Rider, it completely tore apart his Reality Marble. In the Mirror World a few episodes ago, simply swinging the sword caused the Mirror World to break down – which is why he’s even in the real world in the first place. Gil didn’t even do anything at any particular power level back then – he just waved it around, and the fabric of space-time was torn apart. Now, in this finale he stated that Illya was someone worth using his ‘full might’ on. He states that Ea will rend creation itself and incite the hell of genesis. And we believe him, right? Because that’s what Ea does. It’s supposed to do that. It would be odd if it didn’t. We know that it has the power to tear apart dimensions – and coincidentally enough, we know that a certain parallel world exists in this story.
So even if you’re an anime-only viewer, you expect something to happen when he uses Ea at 100%, or at least what feels like 100% to him in his half-incarnated form – instead, what happens? Illya accepts Miyu and her big secret by saying, ‘okay, cool’, which creates a massive plot hole in terms of their character development for 3rei!. Gil completely vanishes for some strange, unexplained reason, and there are now trees where he once was, with no other effect at all. It doesn’t add up from what we know about Gilgamesh and his power, and that’s because it shouldn’t add up – something happened in the manga that the adaptation cut out completely. What about his Class Card? They made it look like they just forgot it even existed.
And I can guess why. After all, how can they continue the slice-of-life filler episodes if there’s the after-effects of a dimension-tearing anti-world weapon just sitting in the sky? If they end the story happily like this, they can spend the first half of the 3rei! anime next year doing exactly what they did this year with Herz – sticking in a bunch of filler for a month or so before retconning in the two girls who appeared at the end, one of which can Install the eighth Archer card everyone was trying so hard to win (she’s the better of the two, by the way). I actually thought the second half of the episode was just a dream Illya was having before she woke up to reality – that’s how bad I thought the changes were.
So this is what I mean by the very future of this anime being compromised – the 3rei! anime won’t be what it should be. The day we get to see this scene animated (heavy, heavy spoilers, beware) is, sadly, very far away.
Overall Thoughts
[spoiler title=”3REI SPOILERS”]
I waited a year to see my Angelica’s face animated, and I don’t even get that? Are we even going to get that this time next year? And what about all the other stuff I was looking forward to – Illyabear, Apneic Beauty, Gilgamesh vs Angelica, anti-Kiritsugu Shirou, chef Kirei, Berserker Sakura? Instead, it’s more Mimi and Tatsuko? How are they even going to jump to the parallel world now? Are they just going to do whatever they want with the story? What the fuck is wrong with you, Silver Link?
[/spoiler]
If I’m asked to evaluate Herz as a whole, and from a holistic viewpoint… I can’t say it was very consistent overall. And this is me trying to be nice to it. To put it another way, its existence was a mistake. What I wanted was Episodes 6, 7, 8 and 9. What it felt like I got was Episodes 1-5 and 10. And I’m saying this as someone who likes lolis, you know? I’m not a loli hater or anything, it’s not like I had to suffer through the slice-of-life episodes – in fact, quite the opposite. As a loli fan, I loved them. But from an objective viewpoint, they should not have existed. The first two seasons of Prisma Illya had slice-of-life too – but it was all in proportion with the actual plot, which gets more exciting exponentially as it goes on. If you experience 3rei! you basically have the same reaction of indescribable hype every chapter. So even if the adaptation eventually pulls through, a huge amount of momentum will be lost. If this was sex, this episode would have been the equivalent of kissing and lots of foreplay – you know, getting into the mood. And right when they’re about to do it, the guy says, ‘sorry, I can’t get it up, goodbye’ and leaves.
I’m terrified for next season’s AntiMagic Academy now, because that’s also being done by Silver Link and has a really dark story at risk of being butchered by extra fanservice. I’m also scared for 3rei!, especially since this has gotten more serious than just delaying the plot with filler – the plot has diverged now. It’s supposed to be what Heaven’s Feel was to Fate/stay – a lot more despair, with wider context given to the story. Now it’s looking more like it’ll be just like Tsukihime the anime.
tl;dr you had one job, silver link
:'(
I… actually came from the final episode thinking that all was well and good in terms of enjoying what I got. I thought “Oh no… the space is swapped but Gil is just going to rip through ‘from underground’ with Ea eventually (as a servant even his mana takes time to regenerate right?)”. Then I saw those two beings at the end, clearly from the parallel world and thought “This is going to be brutal. Gilgamesh vs ‘Gilgamesh’+1 – who’s going to win?”. Either way it would spell trouble for Miyu at the very least.
I was so excited for all that. But is it wrong that I feel my experience has been violated? Knowing now the transition was supposed to be so much more fluid..?
P.S. If anything close to what I thought happens Luvia is going to be out of a house again :v
Sorry. My fault.
But did you not think something was strange after Illya took Miyu’s hand and they all just… went home? Completely forgetting about Gil, who JUST DISAPPEARED? And his Card? And the forest – why was it not immediately swapped after Gil used Enuma Elish and lost, instead only appearing the next morning? All of these questions have no real answers because they are now plot holes that should never have existed in the story.
Also, very minor spoiler about Gilgamesh vs ‘Gilgamesh+1’:
[spoiler] IT HAPPENS, AND IT’S SO HYPE IT’S JUST ASLDKADLKGAFJGHADFSDKFJLSFKHJ [/spoiler]
Baha, it’s nothing to apologize for.
Now this is going to sound very weird and for that I apologize, but once the episode was over…
I didn’t find the going home all too strange since in my mind it was as though Ea’s power to warp reality got blown back on Gil by Quintet Fire and created this “bubble” or “cocoon” of sorts around him, thereby transporting what was contained therein to the other world.
As for the card, I chalked that up to his corrupt self being blown apart and our newcomers stepping on it akin to a bug in the domain of a trapdoor spider. Normally I’d be worried for the souls who chanced upon the card, but upon seeing them in their own Heroic Spirit attire, especially with one clad in Gilgamesh’s armour I expected a hell of a fight to take place!
All the while the entire setup was like a more more drawn out, suspenseful version of when Gil broke through to the real world the first time. Like when Irisviel and Caren drove up to discover the space had been swapped to me it was as though the scene posed the question: “Who was victorious in that battle and used Ea to neatly swap the space and come to this world?!”
We know bad stuff always happens when Momma’s not around, so for all I knew the next season could pick up with Miyu being abducted right in the middle of the study session. Naturally Illya, Kuroe, Ruby, Sapphire, Rin, Luvia (watching her little sister be abducted) and Auguste give chase. Suddenly all of Illya’s friends, Shirou, Sella and Leys are having mysteries and truths unfold just across the street. Finally Irisviel and Caren watch the final moments of this grand chase before all involved suddenly vanish into another dimension. And that’s if some kind of last stand of Miyu’s sake didn’t take place where our heroes are immobilized first so that the ones abducting Miyu can swap the space again and take many people with them in the process.
Yeah. THAT is what I could see happening. But that’s a lot more complicated than what I read in the manga per your recommendation… I think I’ll have to keep reading, quite frankly.
If it doesn’t turn out to all be a dream, I don’t think they’d interrupt the very first study session of next year’s season – they’ll wait it out until Episode 6 or something before making their move. Got to insert a couple more loli yuri make-out sessions first, right? Also it wouldn’t be good if Illya’s friends, Shirou, Sella and Leys have anything to do with the magic stuff Illya gets up to. All of them are human (supposedly even Sella and Leys) and are supposed to represent the everyday peace Illya can now enjoy, away from the tragedy that awaits her in every route of canon. They’d die really fast if they ever got involved.
Do it! Keep reading! Hype awaits!
I was extremely disappointed with the second half of this episode as a manga reader as well, but did you consider if Silver Link writ this before they knew that 3rei would be animated? Maybe they didn’t want to end the season the same way that the manga did because they didn’t want to make manga fans rage if 3rei wasn’t actually confirmed. Also, I’m pretty sure that they’ll do something like making the slice-of-life moments in this episode a dream, or heavily altering the episode for the Blu-ray release to make it have the manga’s ending or something. I am still pretty disappointed that they didn’t use the cliffhanger ending for the last episode of the season, because there’s a lot of suspense that it would give the anime-only viewers and a lot of tension. This comment that I’ve seen sums it up better:
“It completely destroys the impact of 3rei’s cold open. That’s part of what made 3rei feel so different, was there was no easing into it. You are dropped immediately into the shit on chapter 1, picking up where it left off from 2wei. You start immediately in crisis and it actually takes a bit for the tension to wind down.
Silver Link just completely upended that whole tone and fucked up the pacing of the story.”
I guess. No voicing was given to our new characters, after all (and I was so looking forward to that). But I thought one of the reasons they bothered with Herz was because they wanted to give 3rei more time to come up with enough content to animate. Each season of Prisma Illya has been separated by a whole year’s worth of waiting, and up until this season it was bearable because Silver Link produced it really well and was faithful to the source material.
I fully agree with that comment. The cliffhanger ending, coupled with the way 3rei opens is supposed to be a statement – it sends a message that 3rei will be very different from what the series has had to offer thus far, in both tone and content. In fact, even when there’s less tension -the entire time, really- the characters are all in deep shit. So having a slice-of-life lull between 2wei and 3rei is a major fuck-up and is nothing but a detriment to the story.
As for it all being a dream:
[spoiler] I want it to actually be a dream. That might work, because at the start of 3rei Illya is lying unconscious in the crater – they could just make it so that the slice-of-life happy ending wasn’t actually reality. At the same time though, they’ve totally changed the scene with Angelica and Beatrice. How are they supposed to approach Miyu to kidnap her now, if both them and the Archer card are in the parallel world? Irisviel finding the forest means that the hole between dimensions has closed. The only way it would open again is if Angelica uses Ea, and they never tell us whether it’s in her treasury or Gil’s. [/spoiler]
Dropped on final episode.
Hey, Silver Link! You know this part, the part right here? This is the part YOU DO NOT SCREW UP. All of 2wei existed for the sake of getting us to this part. It is the reason for the season. If you could not do this right, you should not have done it at all.
I’m not buying this season, and if that means a 3rei anime doesn’t get made, I think we may be better off. And that’s incredibly sad, because the first two seasons, on a whole, were excellent examples of exactly how adaptations SHOULD be done. How they managed to let it all fall apart this time… I supose I can make some guesses, but it still boggles the mind.
A 3rei anime has been (un)fortunately green-lit. The new logo was the very last frame of the episode. I don’t know when and I don’t know how, but what I do know is that I’m scared.
As for how it fell apart… well, because of money, right? Every episode of filler turns into more cash they can squeeze out of the franchise. Around two of the BD volumes will be purely filler – imagine what it must be like to spend an already-ridiculous price on nothing but filler episodes. In this situation I’m a 3rei fan before I’m a loli fan, and Silver Link seem to be cheerfully shitting all over the former in the hopes of making a bigger profit from the latter.
Oh. Let me just say… I still want a Zwei form figure. I will buy that. I WILL BUY THAT!